In building assistive experiences across the customer decision journey, effective channel strategy is key. Tobias Wilson, VP of Growth, recently made this point clear to Campaign, where he advised brands whose strategies were affected by COVID-19 to “pivot in a way that makes sense. If the channels you’d invested effort in were no longer viable (such as out of home or in-person experiential, in this case), the worst thing you can do is just try to haphazardly replicate that activity online.”

This requires brands to not only look at digital channels they may know, like owned social feeds, but beyond what may have been previously thought possible, reaching audiences where they’re at in this moment. This need led MediaMonks, Reporters Without Borders and DDB to collaborate in building the Uncensored Library, a Minecraft map that users can explore to discover stories written by journalists who have been jailed, exiled or even killed for their work, even if censorship stops them from accessing such stories through other channels. Recognizing Minecraft as an increasingly important space for global youth to gather, socialize and exchange ideas, the virtual library demonstrates how far brands can go to actually connect audiences like never before.

We’ve long advocated for digital, user-centered strategies, which are even more critical as brands look for ways to connect with socially-isolated consumers. We find that customer obsessed organizations (which we explore in-depth in our latest report) are better set up to reimagine what these connections can look like and execute them swiftly.

“Astute brands seize the power of digital and flex it to their categories’ unique need profiles to build experiences of irreplaceable value,” according to Dipanjan Chatterjee, VP & Principal Analyst at Forrester, et al., in the report, “Generate Brand Energy With Digital Experiences: Engage, Excite, And Entangle Your Customer.” Focusing on user needs is vital for brands that want to maintain and improve their connection with consumers. By reinforcing native user behaviors and aligning them with brand values in a creative way, brands can offer relevant solutions that build an emotional impact.

Improve Connections by Fostering Interactions

In today’s changed landscape, brands can no longer rely on face-to-face interactions with their customers. “As we come to grips with a world where we can’t shortcut to experience through physical engagement and personal proximity, the challenge is to deliver on the original intent of digital,” says MediaMonks founder Wesley ter Haar. “Interactive, tactile and personalized moments of magic that create conversation, conversion and commercial opportunities.”

Spotify has exhibited these moments of magic since its start, by receiving, connecting, and interacting diverse social and cultural inputs from thousands of channels and content. One such event is Spotify’s recent digital-native take on musical award ceremonies, including a livestream around the world and via TV broadcast, awarding winners across 57 different categories chosen by user-driven data.

In the months leading up to the ceremony, fans were encouraged to promote their favorite artists and music on social media to boost their chances of winning. “Knowing that their behavior could have a real impact became an incentive for fans to help their favorite artist win by consuming their music on Spotify, whether it was by listening to their tracks, adding them to playlists or following them on the platform,” explains Alejandro Ortiz-Izquierdo, Creative Director at Circus, which merged with MediaMonks in January 2020. 

Tasked by Spotify to build the visual identity surrounding the show, the creative team led by Ortiz-Izquierdo and Alberto Guerra, used a data-driven approach as inspiration. Its main motif was the polygon, designed by connecting the top five streaming cities in Mexico, the regional focus of the show, together. Other polygons took shape by connecting the top streaming cities for different artists, resulting in a series of unique shapes used to develop graphic materials for all communications. “After this, we launched a personalized campaign that focused on celebrating the power of the fans through the data that they generated on Spotify,” says Ortiz-Izquierdo. “From the get-go, there was a great response from the users, with a lot of excitement, engagement and involvement. When we launched the awards, people actually campaigned for their artists.”

Users’ excitement to engage highlights an important part of meeting consumers’ needs in impactful, new ways: operating with transparency. With a focus on user-generated data at every level of the award show’s planning and visual design, listeners understood how their actions made impact. And it drove results, too: “With the event, the number of conversions to premium users grew; new users, streams, and general behavior on the platform increased from the moment we launched the list of finalists,” says Daniela González, Head of Digital Strategy at Circus.

There Are No Borders, Your Playground is Digital

In a world defined by globalization, digital platforms allow users to connect, engage and share with people all over the world, irrespective of nationalities, languages, or cultures––and this, in turn, helps them define their own identities and the communities with which they seek to connect. 

If brands want to connect with their target audience, especially with Gen Z, it’s vital for them to remain aware of how communities are built and redefined. This includes understating the new ways that younger consumers reshape the ways they gather, build identity and engage with brands, which is the focus of a recent whitepaper from IMA, our influencer activation team.

Social channels, in particular, have allowed people from different backgrounds and across the world to connect in virtual spaces, where they can congregate with others who share their interests, beliefs and values. But to recognize these interests and what truly resonates with audiences spread across the CDJ, brands must improve their digital maturity through smarter investments in personalization.

“Social media has become a true melting pot, where everyone and everything fits; interests, similarities and differences in culture, ethnicity or gender, as well as attitudes, personalities and values. Making room for all users to feel at home within a massively globalized world,” says Bruno Lambertini, Founder and CEO of Circus. 

The rate of hyperadoption, in which consumers quickly develop new behaviors, has picked up at a critical time when meeting consumers’ needs across the customer decision journey has become table stakes for brands. By recognizing and rewarding such behaviors through relevant channel strategies, brands better position themselves to bring diverse audiences together online ––and across the world.

Due to the complexity of the healthcare industry, it can be easy for patients to feel confused or intimidated when engaging with medical organizations or touchpoints along the patient journey. In fact, a Forrester report focused on customer experience in the healthcare industry maps out ten different parties with which patients commonly interact across the healthcare ecosystem, including their primary physician, insurance company, labs, pharmacies and several more in-between.

According to the report, healthcare brands are often shortsighted in identifying where they fit along the patient ecosystem, highlighting a need to better understand their needs and behaviors—then deliver upon those expectations with better control of the end-to-end customer experience. A good starting point to approach this, writes Forrester Senior Analyst Faith Adams, is to refresh journey maps continuously. From there, “iterate and expand on your mapping activities to build empathy and trust with your customers.”

Healthcare brands can achieve these aims through superior storytelling methods and smart platform design, both of which should provide people with better access to the information as they need it throughout the patient journey. From setting patient expectations before a visit or empowering them to take control of their treatment options, good digital storytelling and production are key for a better medical experience—here’s our prescription for how brands can improve.

Let Empathy Lead the Experience

One medical practitioner integrating digital storytelling into top-of-funnel touchpoints is Montefiore Medical Center, whose website won a DrupalCon 2019 Splash Award that recognizes the best Drupal projects on the web. The primary function of the Montefiore website is to connect patients with the physician that best suits their medical needs. When users reach a subdomain dedicated to the department most relevant to them—orthopedics or arrhythmia, to name a couple—they’re treated to multimedia stories that showcase the medical center’s empathetic approach to treatment.

Quite a bit goes into these stories, one of which was produced by MediaMonks. Because the physicians know their patients’ stories best, they recommend individuals with unique stories to tell. These often begin with one of the most common frustrations patients feel: that they aren’t being heard. By establishing a narrative that’s centered on the patient’s experiences and is told in their own words, the narrative demonstrates Montefiore’s focus on validating its patients and finding the precise treatment they need. Stories are produced through a series of interviews, a film shoot resulting in several visual assets and illustrations, bot static and animated.

See what happens when integrated content drives a narrative.

Such effective, actionable storytelling isn’t just about creativity and production chops; it requires a backend that supports the rich media you wish to include. MediaMonks worked with Montefiore to optimize its web platform to allow for more dynamic, modular forms of content creation that can empower each department to tell their unique stories while remaining consistent with the overall Montefiore brand.

“Every department has different treatments and different stories to tell,” says Brook Downton, Executive Producer at MediaMonks. “There needs to be some consistency in the way stories are told, but enough dynamism for how different departments can stand out.” An empathetic storytelling approach is a great way to enhance a top-of-funnel medical platform that puts patients at ease while connecting them to the physician they need.

Keep Ease of Access at Top-of-Mind

Two major challenges to proper treatment include lack of accessibility to health services and lack of medical knowledge. For healthcare brands to truly own the end-to-end patient experience, they must take both challenges to mind in designing platforms through which their audiences engage. Take myTomorrows for example, a platform that shortens the timeframe from lab discovery to patient-available medicine by connecting patients with early-access programs or clinical trials that could help treat what ails them.

We worked with myTomorrows to design a digital platform that facilitates this connection in a fast, simple way for patients. It not only provides audiences with access to research and clinical data, but lets them seamlessly get in touch with a live, professional medical team that can provide more context around a given program or trial. This ensures people receive the options that they truly need, and equips them with the right questions to ask their physician.

Much of the friendliness of the myTomorrows platform stems from its visual design. In addition to designing the search platform itself, we included a handful of cheerful illustrations into the platform’s design to help convey a sense of optimism—as users may be driven to the platform in response to hardships that bar access to other types of care. By placing their attention on both form and function, medical practitioners and health brands alike can help users quickly self-serve solutions within an environment that engages them in a friendly way.

All in all, the examples explored above show how insightful digital platform design provides great opportunities for brands to make themselves more approachable and user-friendly. By marrying creative storytelling with technical development, healthcare brands can respond to needs across the patient journey for a greater end-to-end experience.